Cheating on knitting.

I got the sewing machine out today instead of the Noro Striped Scarf I'm working on. I feel so guilty, especially since I am just a few rows and a bind off away from finishing the thing. But before I even bothered eating anything this morning (however definitely not before coffee, mind) I lugged out the machine, which was a lovely wedding present from my friends here in London, but sadly not much used since I received it.

When I was a kid, I used to sit in my room making and sort of half embroidering pillows (both skills that I just improvised - I don't recall ever being actually taught either of these things) - I remember really enjoying doing crafty things like this, but I'm afraid my skills haven't really moved on since then. After much nervousness and pacing around my new beloved sewing machine last year, I finally sat down and made a dress from some gorgeous Liberty fabric that I had bought on sale. Still not the cheapest fabric, I was panicking that I was going to cut or sew something wrong and ruin it completely. Well, it didn't go really well, but it's a dress and I can wear it in public without people staring and pointing. Which is good.

So having discovered the very cool Threadbanger website, I put making this t-shirt dress pretty high on my list of crafty things to do. It's made of just three £2 t-shirts, so if I screwed it up, it would be a loss of time rather than money really. The website claims this should take you 1.5 hours. It took me at least twice that. But it was actually pretty gratifying compared with knitting, an art in which instant gratification is not the object, especially with dresses.

Now this doesn't look amazing, and I am still pretty clumsy with the sewing machine (I should take a class maybe?) but I am pretty happy with the result considering it's only my second somewhat real sewing project.

Unfortunately you can't really see the bottom of the dress in these pics, as I use the photo booth feature on my Mac and couldn't really move back far enough to get it in. But you get the idea. I think maybe it needs a belt around the waist.

Apparently my mother's mother was a real seamstress. My grandfather also owned a men's clothing store back in the day. I got a lot of my grandmother's old sewing notions when she died, and there's her gorgeous antique Singer sewing table that's waiting for me back home (you know the ones where it just looks like a regular table, but then you can open it up from the top and out comes a sewing machine...!) but unfortunately I never got any actual sewing lessons from her, which would have been nice. This sewing stuff, turns out, not so easy!

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Listening to: Ryan Adams (Heartbreaker)

Eating: Winter Cobbler